Twenty-five years since Columbine and my favorite pop album prefigured the decades to come.
Twenty-five years since Columbine and my favorite pop album prefigured the decades to come
T wenty-five years ago, my name first appeared in publication. I had gone to a special meeting at the local Baptist church where youth were encouraged to talk about what had happened at Columbine, and the local newspaper reporter quoted me saying something wrongheaded but grammatically correct. It was some tripe about how it’s easier to change hearts than laws. (I managed to be wrong both on the human condition and on the operation of legislatures.) Although I liked and respected the pastors involved, the event in my memory veered toward the mawkish and then the exploitative. Was it lax gun control? Violent video games? Marilyn Manson? What was to blame for those bombs and shootings in Colorado? Proximate explanations at best, distractions from the truth at worse. Of course it was the primordial evil in men’s hearts. And now that the teens are getting so conveniently, emotionally vulnerable about their mortality, let’s time the altar call correctly.
I had just turned 17 and was possessed by an utterly delusional teenage confidence. Shy in early childhood, I had made a success of our family’s move to Putnam County in New York. By my freshman year, my older friends drove me wherever I wanted to go. An under-the-table job with illegal-for-kids hours at a deli and grocer had me constantly flush with cash, by teen standards. I had, as a junior, achieved my goal of becoming editor in chief of the school’s literary magazine (still one of my most prestigious postings). I found schoolwork easy, and treated anything outside of English and history with disdain, allowing my cleverness to breed laziness and inattention, leading to occasional academic criminality. I recruited friends into the swing-dancing revival fad. I had a yearslong reputation as not being a trouble-maker, which paradoxically then allowed me to walk the halls of the school during the schooldays with total impunity. Fresh off a break-up with a long-term (for that age) girlfriend, I would skip classes I found boring and go flirt with teachers I liked. In a few weeks, I would turn in a floppy disc of 30 corrupted files as my year of “lab work” so I could sit for the chemistry final. I knew my teacher and the New York State Board of Regents would never check.
But that night, after talking about semiautomatic rifles firing into teenage bodies and the already spreading rumor that the two criminals targeted one Christian student for execution, I drove down Route 312 to Route 6 and bought two copies of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds Five on the first day it came out. The first for me, and the second to be dropped off with a note and flowers to the senior girl on whom I really had a crush at the time.
I wasn’t prepared for what I heard. The group’s first albums were wry and raw. In an age of power chords played through distortion, Folds, a pianist, understood that he was somewhere between Randy Newman and outright showtunes. So on the early albums, he leaned into a barrel-house style and recruited a bassist out of a band called Toxic Popsicle and a drummer from his hometown. They were a power trio like Nirvana, but with songs that were character studies, full of voice-leading and musically adventurous gospel-style 2-5-1 turnarounds. They played their instruments like punk rockers, but Folds was fundamentally a nerd and kind of a theater kid. They would break into polka, or jazz, to flash their chops. Folds was also possessed of delusional confidence, and he became the pop artist I cared about most from then on.
But Messner was different. Musically, it was a departure toward something epic, the three members straining to make the largest possible stadium-feeling sound on the opening track, “Narcolepsy.” The compositions had brio, and were obviously the product of a concept album that had never quite coalesced into the one long musical composition deep in Folds’s mind. But thematically, Folds had lost his youthful resentment and replaced it with resignation. Even in the upbeat single, “Army,” colored-up with a horn section, Folds is singing about serial failures. The band that abandoned him, working crappy jobs, contemplating enlistment, the break-ups with his ex-wives. The rest of the album heads toward a melancholic Chamber-pop sound that had barely existed on radio since the Left Banke’s “Don’t Walk Away, Renee” had charted in the 1960s. (Of course, that song stalked me too, since it played almost every day I was working the grocer’s register, taunting me about my first breakup.)
“Don’t Change Your Plans” has Folds narrating a breakup with a woman he’s helped move to Los Angeles, as he goes back to the East Coast. It’s pretty, evocative, and regretful.
In the next track, “Mess,” Folds plays a piano filled with tacks to sound like a toy, underneath a crying string section. It’s a country song, without twang or humor. The propulsive chorus is a wail: “And I don’t believe in God / So I can’t be saved / All alone, as I’ve learned to be / In this mess I have made.” Even the songs that at first sound like they are breaking into silliness are about regrets, or the inescapability of our past decisions.
I loved this new ambition for the band, but it was like a premonition of what was to come for me personally and for the rest of the country. It wasn’t overnight, but the dark effect of Columbine started to come into the school the next year. The administration didn’t bother me too much, but they began to crack down on the movements of the younger students. Outcasts who previously had reminded you of characters from The Breakfast Club were suddenly subjected to a more probing form of school psychiatry and scrutiny.
That summer, I snuck backstage after Ben Folds Five played Summer Stage in Central Park. I hung out like I belonged there, and waited for my opportunity. I had seen the band walking in the city earlier, mobbed by fans who were all alike in shouting and proclaiming their singular love for them. I took the exact opposite tack, patiently waiting my turn to speak. “Hey, can you do me a big favor?” Each member of the band immediately locked onto me when I said those words. “There’s a girl who wanted to be here tonight. I’m mad about her. Can you write her a note?” They each did, alternately praising me as a great kisser or threatening her with the fires of hell if she failed to marry me.
By the fall, I was stuck in school with my ex-girlfriend and her succession of new boyfriends. The only fun in it was occasionally throwing a longing look at her and seeing it grabbed her emotions. The girl to whom I gave my second copy of Messner was just an hour away in college. Most of my close friends were in college. Another was in Germany as an exchange student. The glory days were over.
I started disappointing people. Or realizing I was. An editing error I had missed mangled a junior’s short story in the final print edition of the literary magazine. I still think about it and the author’s ashen face when she saw it. My mother wanted me to go to school in England. For someone who raised me on Irish nationalism, she had always seen herself moving to Blighty to be with her best friend, and my godmother. I toured colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. In homage to C. S. Lewis, I bought books by G. K. Chesterton at Blackwell’s. But I didn’t do as she wished. One of my best friends wanted me to move to Los Angeles. He had a Kevin Smith–style screenplay. Actually, there was a whole troop of us who knew we could have been like those guys from Swingers, or like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. I didn’t do that either. I turned down all those adventures and went to the only college that would let me keep my beat-up 1992 Saturn SL2 on campus as a freshman and was within driving distance of home and that girl.
Life would keep kicking me. The virtues I had failed to learn as a young man would now result in hard lessons. The feeling that my talent would win me a decent life or better evaporated. I needed to get grinding fast. I had two campus jobs but was broke. I provoked the other students at Bard College wantonly and was friendless there. My mind was on my single mother, spiraling further into depression and bad health as her only son ventured from the nest. I tried to visit my old high-school teachers and was treated like a criminal for entering without appointments or warning. Why? A student had been caught bringing an AK-47 onto the property in his trunk. The Columbine era of insecurity and humiliation had turned the halls in which I was free into a policed green zone.
Little did I know we had entered what one of my favorite writers called “our miserable 21st century” — when everything seemed to be going wrong for America. For a little over a decade, every decision I made about school and work was a bust. My LSAT score was not where I wanted it, and besides, all my lawyer friends were trying to get out. I wanted to write a film. It went nowhere. I wanted to write for men’s magazines, and even got the chance at Esquire. Before I could turn in the assignment, the financial crisis hit and the section I was supposed to debut in was canceled. The magazine I started to work for was perpetually on the edge of insolvency. I took a job back home, and the boss turned out to be a paranoid maniac, who seriously entertained the thought I had made up a fake fiancée and wedding invitation in order to get a week off in September.
The only thing I got right the first time in the decade after April 27, 1999, was the girl. She finally broke up with her boyfriend. We started dating. Years later, once I figured out how to earn just a tiny bit of money, I asked and she married me, as Ben Folds had jokingly commanded her to do years earlier. Last week, for my birthday, her family bought us tickets to see Ben Folds locally while my in-laws watched our three kids. He sang “Don’t Change Your Plans” and put on a sweet, intimate, nostalgic show. And I realized that in the last quarter century, I had messed up, botched, or passed over a dozen different adventures. The whole world went mad, and all the high expectations of my generation had been dashed. I threw away a half dozen dreams and betrayed my own ambitions. But 25 years ago this week, I decided that she was the one. And when I look at her face in the morning, all my disappointments and regrets, every opportunity I walked away from has become nothing. Another rock band, Queens of the Stone Age, put out a funky torch song a few years ago, “The Way You Used to Do.” It’s the closest we’ve come to another swing revival in 25 years. “If the world exploded behind us, I never noticed if it done,” Josh Homme sings.
It was a downer of a quarter century, wasn’t it? Yeah, but when you get the girl, it’s the best time of your life.